A Brief Visit With My Inner Diesel

In the back of the new Diesel flagship on Madison Avenue, near the jeans bar, which breaks down the company’s offerings into various cuts (Slim? Sure. Tapered? Fine. Carrot? Ummmmmm.), there is a small museumlike display paying homage to the brand’s long-running wrestling match with denim.

Here are clothes from the 1980s and 1990s, ones in which the fabric is manipulated, distressed, cut up, accessorized, pushed to its emotional breaking point (if denim had a heart). You look down from these pieces, encased in glass on the wall, to the Diesel jeans of today and find that the war on denim is very much alive.

In fairness, we are in an era of distressed jeans, when the average pair has sacrificed 20 to 40 percent of its front material, leaving a topographic map of cutouts and frayed edges. In the space of the last decade, we have gone from utilitarian denim to premium denim to art denim.

Or at Diesel, all of these things at once, together, and manqué.

In the 1990s, Diesel’s Lexington Avenue location was an amusement park of European slickness, moto kitsch and soft fashion aspiration. The brand offered a starter kit for those ready to graduate from streetwear or, you know, regular clothes, but not ready to submit to adulthood. Baby’s first tight-cut shirt almost certainly came from Diesel. Same for baby’s first treated denim.

Image

CreditJennifer S. Altman for The New York Times

Back then, Diesel made clothing for wayward foreign exchange students spending their parents’ money on bottle service and foam parties. Now, though, Nicola Formichetti is in charge. He has been the brand’s artistic director since 2013. By all accounts, he has a sense of humor, of color, of freedom.

And yet Diesel remains irreparably Diesel. I made my way there one recent afternoon, a field trip into the heart of gaucheness. If there was ever a right day to wear my black En Noir x Gap hooded jacket made of waxed denim and leather, this was it.

What I found was a Madison Avenue store with West Eighth Street soul. The brand remains committed to its middle station, with selections that feel like shrugged-off takes on what’s happening farther up Madison: a Chelsea boot with a vertical zipper right through the elastic pulls ($290); a not-wholly-unappealing ivory patchwork sweater described on the label as being made with “Italian Yarn” ($198); a perforated black leather jacket with a loud sweatshirt-ish lining ($698); some sort of studded dog tag ($105).

The eyebrow arching extended even to the Diesel Black Gold collection, the company’s premium line, which included a 13-pound heavily studded motorcycle jacket ($6,750) suitable for, perhaps, Flo Rida or John Cena or some other musclebound entertainer who needs to telegraph the most fashionable menace possible.

Back at the jeans bar, things were much the same. Our grandchildren will taunt us as the generation that allowed our jeans and our sweatpants to become one: “Was everyone that lazy, Grandpa?”

No, we weren’t. I tried on a couple of pairs to remind myself of my belief system, like a Bernie bro watching a few minutes of Fox News. The beige pair — $278! — made my unstubby legs look stubby indeed. The gray pair had biker-pants accents and hospital-scrubs fit.

But things got more complicated with the more familiar denim (the company’s coin-pocket label is so familiar, it even adorns iPhone and iPad cases). It turns out the carrot pair fit beautifully; a pair in a dark, chalky gray ($198) was eminently appropriate.

And then I tried on one of the more molested pairs, with abrasions all over and black denim patches sewn into blue denim gaps. I looked … good? The same went for a gray leather jacket in a finish that recalled acid-washed denim ($998) that I selected off the rack for its humor value and found myself unexpectedly attracted to.

Image

CreditJennifer S. Altman for The New York Times

All of us, we know there is a slightly tacky version of ourselves lurking within, an identity that a few wise turns in life have prevented us from having to own. Call it your inner Diesel: not a place I could live, but I didn’t mind visiting.

Besides, sometimes that inner voice delivers surprise.

Years and years of experience fiddling with denim means you’re likely to stumble upon new tricks before anyone else. There, in the front of the store, as part of the Diesel Black Gold collection, was such an item: a pair of preposterously long jeans, designed to scrunch and gather not just around the ankle, but up the full length of the leg ($450).

One of the mannequins wore a black pair. The legs looked like stacks of thin cookies. I felt compelled to try on a pair.

They were difficult to maneuver, both a logistical nightmare and almost an avant-garde disruption. They made Vetements’ sail-size clothes look eminently reasonable. They were so skeptical about form that they verged on Kawakubo territory.

They suggested expertise, and whimsy, and confidence — the product of a crafty veteran who has tried everything else, and then tears up the old playbook and tries to write a new one.